"A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective"
About this Quote
Gide’s line needles the bourgeois fantasy that life is a problem you solve by marching efficiently toward a goal. The “straight path” sounds virtuous: disciplined, rational, modern. But he drains it of romance by reducing its payoff to something almost bureaucratic: “the objective.” You reach the target, yes, and also nothing else. No detours that become discoveries, no accidents that reshape desire, no moral friction that forces you to change. Just arrival.
The phrasing is slyly double-edged. “Never leads anywhere” is technically false, then immediately corrected: it leads precisely where it claims to. That little twist functions like a literary trapdoor, revealing Gide’s real point: the straight path is a kind of imaginative poverty. In narrative terms, it’s an anti-plot. A novel built on pure efficiency would be a memo. Gide, a modernist with a suspicion of inherited pieties, is defending the value of deviation not as laziness but as a method of becoming.
Context matters: Gide wrote in an era when propriety, productivity, and moral certainty were treated as proofs of character. His work, often preoccupied with freedom, desire, and the hypocrisies of respectable life, treats “objective” as a suspect word - a mask for someone else’s expectations. The subtext is a provocation: if your route is too clean, you may be living inside a plan that isn’t yours. Detours aren’t just scenic; they’re where a self gets authored.
The phrasing is slyly double-edged. “Never leads anywhere” is technically false, then immediately corrected: it leads precisely where it claims to. That little twist functions like a literary trapdoor, revealing Gide’s real point: the straight path is a kind of imaginative poverty. In narrative terms, it’s an anti-plot. A novel built on pure efficiency would be a memo. Gide, a modernist with a suspicion of inherited pieties, is defending the value of deviation not as laziness but as a method of becoming.
Context matters: Gide wrote in an era when propriety, productivity, and moral certainty were treated as proofs of character. His work, often preoccupied with freedom, desire, and the hypocrisies of respectable life, treats “objective” as a suspect word - a mask for someone else’s expectations. The subtext is a provocation: if your route is too clean, you may be living inside a plan that isn’t yours. Detours aren’t just scenic; they’re where a self gets authored.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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